The detection and recognition of user gestures from images currently requires complex sensor suites, involving, for example, time-of-flight sensors, structured light sensors, and the like. Moreover, algorithms for determining user gestures from the sensor data from these sensor suites are complex and slow. As a result, current gesture recognition systems are impractical from a cost perspective and offer a poor user experience due to lag.
It would be desirable to develop an algorithm that can determine user gestures more quickly and can work robustly on lower cost hardware, such as single video camera systems. While such an algorithm may optionally be used on higher-end hardware with complex sensor suites, one of the advantages is being able to provide fast and accurate gesture detection from a video.